This is the product vision for Create. The Create stage of the DevOps lifecycle covers code creation, which includes source code management (Git, Git LFS etc), merge requests, wiki, snippets and Web IDE. Please read through to understand where we're headed and feel free to jump right into the discussion by commenting on one of the epics or issues, or by reaching out directly to our product manager leading this area: James Ramsay (E-Mail | Twitter)

Note that this stage is also involved in delivering improvements for our mobile development and delivery use case. If you have an interest in mobile development using GitLab, please also take a look there.

Landscape

Git's distributed design made new collaborative workflows possible, and has been adopted rapidly over the last decade. Powerful simplifying concepts like forking and merge requests have been embraced in the everyday routines of nearly every developer, yet few significant changes have been made in recent years to embrace the global scale of collaboration between open source and private companies, or improve the way complex real world code is written, reviewed and merged.

GitLab has made it faster and easier to get ideas into production by creating a single integrated application. This is just the beginning. Greater maturity in the tools we use for creating, collaborating and reviewing will make it easier for everyone to start contributing, engineers to work better together, improve quality and build better application faster. It is still day one.

Categories

There are a few product categories that are critical for success here; each one is intended to represent what you might find as an entire product out in the market. We want our single application to solve the important problems solved by other tools in this space - if you see an opportunity where we can deliver a specific solution that would be enough for you to switch over to GitLab, please reach out to the PM for this stage and let us know.

Each of these categories has a designated level of maturity; you can read more about our category maturity model to help you decide which categories you want to start using and when.

Source Code Management

Source code management enables coordination, sharing and collaboration across the entire software development team. Track and merge branches, audit changes and enable concurrent work, to accelerate software delivery. This category is at the "lovable" level of maturity.

Search

The Advanced Global Search in GitLab is a powerful search service that saves you time. Instead of creating duplicate code and wasting time, you can now search for code within other teams that can help your own project. GitLab leverages the search capabilities of Elasticsearch This category is planned, but not yet available.

Snippets

Web IDE

A full featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) built into GitLab so you can start contributing on day one with no need to spend days getting all the right packages installed into your local dev environment. This category is at the "minimal" level of maturity.

Live Coding

Gitter

This category is planned, but not yet available.

Important Concepts

❤️ More Complete (Minimally Lovable) Features to Solve Complex Problems

We build software with small mininal iterations, but at the same time we need to continue to improve the features that are proven to be valuable into complete, lovable features that exceed our users expectations.

This is particularly pertinent to the Create stage of the DevOps lifecycle which is relatively mature and the foundation on which GitLab is built.

✌️ Amplify Best Practices

Focussing on reducing the cycle time of development can result in good habits being forgotten. We should amplify the benefits of following the best practices when writing and reviewing code, so that when our customers grow we've helped build a foundation that will help them move even faster.

🌊 Flow

Being a single application provides unqiue opportunities to features that connect different parts of the GitLab application, with greater efficiency, or in entirely new ways. We must balance creating flows between stages of the DevOps lifecycle and the flows and feedback loops within the Create stage too.

Prioritization Process

We follow the same prioritization guidelines as the product team at large. When prioritizing new features and significant improvements we consider reach, impact, confidence and effort to find the most valuable improvements. This is based on RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers. Requests from customers and upvotes are an important signal for this process.

The 'Create: RICE scoring' spreadsheet is available on Google Drive to all GitLab staff. The spreadsheet is not public because it contains sensitive customer information.

Our entire public backlog for Create can be viewed here, and can be filtered by labels or milestones. If you find something you are interested in, you're encouraged to jump into the conversation and participate. At GitLab, everyone can contribute!

Issues with the "direction" label have been flagged as being particularly interesting, and are listed in the sections below.

FY20 Q3

Other Interesting Items

There are a number of other issues that we've identified as being interesting that we are potentially thinking about, but do not currently have planned by setting a milestone for delivery. Some are good ideas we want to do, but don't yet know when; some we may never get around to, some may be replaced by another idea, and some are just waiting for that right spark of inspiration to turn them into something special.

Remember that at GitLab, everyone can contribute! This is one of our fundamental values and something we truly believe in, so if you have feedback on any of these items you're more than welcome to jump into the discussion. Our vision and product are truly something we build together!